Maya 8.0 rendering problem

[ker-plop]

Has anyone else had trouble rendering their movies in Maya 8.0? I tried to render a 176-frame animation at least eight times tonight, and it always crashed on a random frame, always when it was 96% done.

I've always tried to render it into a Quicktime file, with h.264 at best quality.

When I removed the Alpha Channel, it completed fine, but the animation didn't show up in the .mov file; just black.

Has anyone had a problem like this? How can I fix it? I only have six weeks to get this cartoon finished, and I've barely started. Thanks.

[guns1inger]

Just a tip, from someone who has been doing 3D for more years than I care to remember, render to still frames and build your video later. It means you don't have to re-render as many frames if something glitches, and it is easier to go back and make subtle changes if necessary. Use tif or tga if you need alpha channel support.

[ker-plop]

I did try rendering it as a series of .tif files, but something else happened; the files were out of order when I imported the series to After Effects. I repeated it three times with different file names, but got the same result... and it kept crashing while rendering those, too, also at 96% each time.